2/12/12

Obama & Duncan Think Teachers Are Just Too Stupid

“The Best And the Brightest”- President Obama’s Approach to School Reform

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced
modifications to the No Child Left Behind program on Thursday at the
White House., Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP Photo

When Barack Obama ascended to the Presidency, he was fired up with a
desire to improve America’s schools, which he felt were falling behind
those of other advanced countries. He decided to bring “the best minds
in the country” in to help them with this task- CEO’s of successful
businesses, heads of major foundations, young executives from management
consulting firms- to figure out a strategy to transform America’s
schools, especially those in low performing districts. He promised them
full support of his Administration when they finally came up with
effective strategies including the use of federal funding to persuade,
and if necessary, compel local districts to implement them.

Notably missing in this brain trust were representatives of America’s
teachers and school administrators, but their absence was not
accidental. Because the President and his chief education adviser, Arne
Duncan, believed that a key problem in America’s schools was the low
quality of the people working in them, they felt no need to include
principals and teachers in the Administrations education planning,
especially since those plans involved putting pressure on them to
perform and then removing those who couldn’t meet the new standards.

From a management standpoint the reforms developed, which including
promoting competition, universalizing teacher evaluation based on
student test scores, introducing merit pay, made perfect sense. However,
since none of the people developing the reforms had spent much time in
a classroom, or were willing to spend a significant part of their
lives performing the jobs they were reshaping, they had little idea what
their reforms meant “on the ground,” and even less evidence that, when
implemented, they would be effective.

Now three years later,
after all of these new policies have been put into effect, from New York
to Chicago, to Philadelphia to Buffalo, there is no evidence than
America’s schools are performing better than when the President entered
office, or that the test score gap between wealthy and poor districts is
being reduced. But evidence and experience doesn’t seem to matter when
you bring “the best minds in the country” together to develop a
strategy. Come on, how can Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, and
the Ivy League gurus from Teach for America be wrong, and graduates of
state teachers colleges and teacher education programs be right?

But reality has a way of intruding even on “the best and the brightest”
when the fundamental assumptions that guide policy are wrong. This
happened during the Vietnam War, when an indigenous nationalist
revolution was treated as an arm of a global Communist conspiracy, and
it is happening now when school failures due to poverty and inequality
are being blamed on incompetent teachers and administrators.

So
as in Vietnam, we will invest hundreds of billions, maybe trillions of
dollars in a cause, which, at the end of the day, will turn into a
Fool’s Errand, undermining the careers and demeaning the efforts of the
nation’s teachers, dividing communities against themselves, while
fattening the pockets of consulting form, test companies and on line
learning firms.

And ten years down the road, when all the damage
is done, policy makers will wake up and call America’s teachers back in
to ask “What do you think we should do?” And they will say that
teaching has to be a life time calling, and that when dealing with
children, there are no miracles- opening minds, and changing lives,
requires hard work, persistence, imagination, and a love for the young
people you are working with. And those are tasks that cannot be
performed by computers or “managed” by people who have never worked with
children themselves.